Startups

Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered company builder that invests in individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” to help create new technology startups, is continuing to expand internationally. Following adding an outpost and program in Singapore, in addition to London, the so-called talent-first investor is setting up shop in Berlin, kicking off its first German program this April. That

You can’t swing a cat in the Bay Area without hitting some startup accelerator or another, but it can be hard to find one with a mission. That’s the easy part with the Ocean Solutions Accelerator, a new program that aims to help advance startups in tech and conservation relating to… you guessed it, the

Fintech startup Revolut is launching international medical and dental insurance. You can subscribe using the company’s app for £1 per day or more depending on the options. But the best part is that you can set it up and forget about it as Revolut uses your device’s location data to automatically turn insurance coverage on

Curve, the London fintech startup that offers a platform that lets you consolidate all your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending, is finally launching to U.K. consumers. Up until now, the service remained in beta and was only officially available to business users. In

Cloud hosting company DigitalOcean is launching some new price offerings today. In particular, the company is also upgrading its basic $5 droplet instances with better specs for the first time in years. Five years ago, DigitalOcean offered something quite revolutionary. Before today, you could pay $5 per month and get a server with 20GB of

In a move that represents further consolidation in the crowdsourced in-store data gathering space, London-headquartered BeMyEye has acquired U.K. rival Task360. Similar to BeMyEye, the company offers an app that pays users to collect data for its corporate clients, but with a greater emphasis on time-sensitive tasks. Financial terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed, though

Tech.co, an online platform and events organizer for startups, announced today that it has been acquired by digital marketing firm MVF. The deal’s terms were undisclosed. Tech.co originated from Tech Cocktail, which was created in 2006 by Frank Gruber and Eric Olson to connect the Chicago startup ecosystem by hosting regular events before accelerators and

Researchers Neil Gandal, JT Hamrick, Tyler Moore, and Tali Oberman have written a fascinating paper on Bitcoin price manipulation. Entitled “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” and appearing in the recent issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics the paper describes to what degree the Bitcoin ecosystem is controlled by bad actors. To many it’s

London ‘proptech’ startup Goodlord, which offers cloud-based software to help estate agents, landlords and tenants manage the rental process, has announced the appointment of serial entrepreneur and investor William Reeve as CEO. It follows a recent restructuring of the company that saw nearly 40 people laid off, and the stepping down of co-founder Richard White,

Brit + Co laid off some employees earlier this month as part of a reorganization, TechCrunch has learned. Brit + Co declined to comment on the number laid off, but the women’s lifestyle and digital media company’s employee base went from 92 people in September 2017 to just 78 today, according to its team page.

Irish startup SoapBox Labs is on a mission to create what it calls “the world’s most accurate and accessible speech technology for children”, tech it plans to offer to third-party hardware and app developers. These span educational apps that support reading and language development, children’s voice-control for IoT devices in the home, smart toys, and

Hulu on Friday released the first images of the next season of The Handmaid’s Tale, announcing that the next season will be released in April. Unfortunately, they weren’t any more specific than that. Another lingering question is whether or not Hulu will continue on with its weekly release of episodes for Season 2. In the

Just a few weeks ago I was in Utah for the holidays, spending time with the many family members my husband and I both have there. At one family gathering, a cousin began talking about how he bought a brand new home and sold his own home all without a real estate agent on a

Nuheara’s new IQBuds Boost headphones exist in a a strange sort of in-between spot. Like the rest of the company’s line, they’re clearly one of countless devices looking to compete in the crowded world of bluetooth earbuds. Like the standard IQBuds before them, however, they’re also designed to boost hearing. But the Boosts are an

As we noted earlier this week, the mere fact that Blocks was able to bring its modular smartwatch system to market feels like a minor miracle. The company appears to have not taken the easy route in any respect. It could have launched an Android Wear device, but instead opted to skin a scaled down

Y Combinator is pulling the curtains off of a new experiment, YC Bio. The idea is to fund early-stage life-sciences companies that are still in the lab phase, YC President Sam Altman wrote on the YC blog today. YC Bio’s first area of focus will be on healthspan and age-related disease. “We think there’s an

Startup Closetbox recently raised a $7.3 million Series A round, bringing its total amount of funding to $19.8 million. Closetbox, of course, has competitors like fellow startups Makespace and Omni, as well as larger companies like Pods and Public Storage. Closetbox offers “full-service storage,” which means it has professional movers come to your house to

Codeless development platforms are at once a blessing and a curse. If they’re complete enough to be powerful they are too difficult for beginners and if they’re simple enough for beginners they’re useless for serious work. Zeroqode, a one-stop-shop for codeless creation, aims to make the difficult easy and the easy more powerful. Created by

Recent Sphero spinoff Misty Robotics brought a decidedly non-consumer-focused device to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week. The Misty I Developer Edition is the first baby step for a startup with even grander ambitions than the one that gave birth to it. In June, the company announced a $11.5 million Series A led

A glitch on Overstock’s website allowed users to send amounts of Bitcoin Cash to Overstock when the system was expecting Bitcoin, leading to drastic discounts on many items. Given that BTC is about $14,000 and Bitcoin Cash is $2,400, the mistake could have been quite costly. Originally reported by Brian Krebs, the exploit allowed you

Optimizely helps businesses test out different ways to make their websites or apps more effective — but, as vice president of Product Management Claire Vo put it, how do you go from “five experiments per week to hundreds and thousands of experiments per week”? Vo said companies face real challenges as they try to increase

URB-E, the startup that creates foldable electric scooters, is launching a transportation system designed to promote scooter sharing on colleges campuses and other large residential developments. One of URB-E’s first deployments is on USC’s campus in Los Angeles, where they will provide over 40,000 rides this year. Campuses like USC will pay URB-E for the

Bugsnag, the cloud service that helps developers find bugs inside their software, announced a $9 million Series B today. They also released a new version of their dashboard that features a stability score than can give customers an unbiased grade of the current stability of their software. Let’s look at the funding first. Investors included

Some ideas you hear and they immediately make sense. Some take a minute, but the more you think about them, the better they seem. Euveka, a mannequin for clothing designers that can change shape and size in seconds, is the latter — and I think it may eventually be a standard item in any fashion

Goodlord, the London ‘proptech’ startup that has built a software platform to handle transactions and the “paperwork” normally associated with renting a home, has laid off nearly 40 employees, while TechCrunch understands from sources that co-founder and CEO Richard White will soon be leaving the company. The job losses are said to be in sales and

We just could not stay away! In December, TechCrunch held Disrupt at the Berlin Arena. We were wowed by the Berlin startup scene and just couldn’t get enough. In fact, Germany’s own Blik became the 2017 runner-up of Startup Battlefield Berlin. Well now we are back, and we want to meet more of your startups. TechCrunch is

Money transfer company TransferWise has begun a private launch of its “Borderless account” for consumers. It marks the first time the European unicorn has offered a debit card (pictured below), a move that is bound to draw further comparisons with newer fintech upstarts such as Revolut. Initially rolling out to a thousand customers, with several

If you’ve gotten three apps and a Fitbit so you can get skinnier this year, don’t worry so much about summer beach season or holiday weight gain. Instead, worry about Thursday. Researchers at University of South Carolina found that self-reporting of food was integral to weight loss but that self-reporters often fell off, seemingly around

Relative autonomous driving industry newcomer Aurora has been revealing a lot of early traction lately, and now we know that it’s also working with GPU-maker Nvidia. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed that his company will be supplying Aurora with the tech underlying their compute platform. Aurora is building self-driving systems for both Volkswagen and Hyundai,

Wait, what? Yeah, this week a company called SuperMeat announced that it raised $3 million to create chicken in a lab. It requires real chicken cells, Petrie dishes probably and some patience. The benefits for fake (fake real?) chicken are numerous, not the least of which it’s better for the environment. But we wonder how